Willard and his Bowling Trophies
Richard Brautigan was born in the Pacific North-West in 1935, and now lives in San Francisco. His novels, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, A Confederate General from Big Sur, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Sombrero Fallout, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, have all been published in Picador, as has his collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn.
Also by
Richard Brautigan in Picador
Trout Fishing in America
In Watermelon Sugar
A Confederate General from Big Sur
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western
Revenge of the Lawn
Sombrero Fallout
Dreaming of Babylon
Richard Brautigan
Willard and His
Bowling Trophies
A Perverse Mystery
published by Pan Books
First published in Great Britain 1976 by Jonathan Cape Ltd
This edition published 1977 by Pan Books Ltd,
Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG
© Richard Brautigan 1976
ISBN 0 330 26250 X
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior
consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
'The dice of Love are madnesses and melees'
Anacreon
The Greek Anthology
'This land is cursed with violence'
Senator Frank Church
Democrat, Idaho
The Greek Anthology
Constance turned herself awkwardly on the bed to watch him leave the room.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day long,” Bob said. “I want you—” Then he was gone with his voice trailing away, “to hear it,” down the hall to another room.
She lay there awkwardly waiting for him to return. She thought that he was only going to be gone for a moment but he was gone for almost ten minutes.
The air in the bedroom was warm and still. It was an unusually warm September evening in San Fran cisco but the window was closed and the shades were down.
They had to be.
He can’t find the book, she thought
He was always losing things. For many long months now he’d had a lot of trouble doing anything right. It made her sad because she loved him.
She sighed, which became a slight muffled sound because of the handkerchief that was loosely stuffed in her mouth. She could have easily pushed the handkerchief out of her mouth with her tongue if she had wanted to.
Bob couldn’t do anything right now.
He couldn’t even gag her well.
But of course he had tied her hands too tight and her feet too loose and she sighed again, making a muffled sound as she waited for him to find the book that he’d lost which was usual for everything he did now.
He hadn’t always been this way and she felt guilty about it because she thought that it was partly her fault for giving him the warts and after he got the warts, all of this stuff started happening.
The light hanging down from the ceiling should have been a hundred-watt bulb, but instead it was a two hundred-watt bulb. It was his doing. She didn’t like that much light. He did.
Finally he came back into the room with the book and she pushed the gag out of her mouth and said, “My hands are too tight.”
“Oh,” he said, looking down at her from the book in his hand which was turned to a particular page that he was just about to read aloud.
He put the book down on the bed, still opened to the page that he wanted to read from. He sat down beside her and she rolled awkwardly over onto her stomach, so that he could get at the knot in the rope. She didn’t have any clothes on and she had a nice body.
He retied her hands so that they weren’t as tight, but they were still tight enough so that she couldn’t get them loose.
“Retie my feet,” she said. “They’re too loose.”
If he’s going to be an amateur sadist, she thought, I might as well see if I can get him to do it right.
She was very disappointed in him. She was a perfectionist in everything that she did and was very annoyed with his newly found incompetence.
For months now, ever since he had gone on his amateur sadist trip, she had been thinking: Anybody can tie up somebody and gag them, why can’t he?
Why can’t he do anything right and he overwaters the plants and things drop out of his hands and he’s always falling over things and breaking things and he forgets what he’s talking about half the time in the middle of what he’s saying but I guess it really doesn’t make that much difference because he doesn’t talk about anything interesting, anyway, and it’s been going on for months, ever since she gave him the warts, but hadn’t she suffered with them, too, going to the doctor all those times and having the warts burned off in her vagina with an electric needle and then coming home on the bus, holding back the tears in a lonely moving place filled with silent strangers? . . . oh, God . . . oh, well . . . we could be dead. Maybe this is better than being dead, I guess. I don’t know.
After he finished tying her feet again, he started to pick up the book that he had been about to read from. Then he noticed that the gag was out of her mouth. He put the book back down and leaned over toward her. She knew what he wanted and what he was going to do.
She opened her mouth as wide as she could.
He suddenly got nervous. Sometimes when he gagged her he pushed part of the gag against her lower lip with his thumb and he would hurt her mouth as it was going in and she would really get mad at him and curse him, “BASTARD!” Then the gag would be in her mouth and her curses would be muffled, inarticulate, but he knew what she was saying and it always made him feel bad and sometimes he would blush and his ears would tingle with embarrassment.
She would glower up at him from beautiful green eyes. He would turn away from them and wait for her to calm down.
He didn’t like being an incompetent but there was nothing that he could do about it. It had been going on for months and it didn’t make him feel very good either.
He could tell by how wide she had just opened her mouth that he had better control his nervousness and not hurt her when he put the gag back in her mouth.
Her mouth was delicate, her tongue sculptured and pink. The gag was already very wet from her spit. He put it carefully back into her mouth, making sure that he did not hurt her with his thumb. He took his index finger and worked the gag back into all the crevices of her mouth.
She lay there on her stomach with her hands tied behind her back, resting just above her ass. Her head was arched back now, so she would be in a better position for him to gag her.
They had done this many times.
The room was illuminated by a light that was too bright.
She had long blonde hair.
There was just a small piece of the gag sticking out between her teeth. He very carefully tucked that piece into her mouth. Then he gave the gag a good push with his finger straight back into her mouth, so as to make her tongue totally immobile, useless to push the gag out with.
He was very nervous and he tri
ed to control it because he didn’t want to hurt her but he also wanted the gag to be firmly in her mouth.
She moaned behind the gag when he started pushing it back into place with his finger. She moved her head suddenly side to side as if to escape the finger that was pushing the gag against her tongue.
He continued pushing for a few more seconds and then he knew it was in place and she would not be able to work it out with her tongue.
About once in every ten times he would gag her effectively. He just didn’t have it together any more. He knew that his failures annoyed her, but what else could he do?
His whole life was a sloppy and painful mess.
He had used adhesive tape for a while. The tape always gagged her effectively but she didn’t like the way it hurt when he pulled it off. Even if he pulled it off very gently, it still hurt like hell, so the tape had to go.
“No,” she had said about the tape and he knew that it was no. She had never said no before, so he stopped using the tape.
He took his finger out of her mouth and stroked the side of her face. She relaxed her head. He stroked her hair. She stared silently up at him. She really had very beautiful eyes. Everybody always mentioned that to her. She awkwardly crawled and inched her body over to him. It was difficult but she got her head up onto his lap and she was staring up at him. Her hair poured over his lap like blonde water.
She really loved him.
That’s what made it all so bad.
“Can you breathe all right?” he said.
She nodded her head gently that she could breathe all right.
“Does the gag hurt?”
She shook her head gently that the gag did not hurt.
“Do you want to hear what I read today?”
She nodded her head gently that she wanted to hear what he had read today.
He picked up the book.
It was a very old book.
He read to her: “ ‘O Poverty, thou grievous and resistless ill, who with thy sister Helplessness overwhelmest a great people . . .’ ”
She stared up at him,
“That’s Alcaeus from the Greek Anthology,” he said. “That was written over two thousand years ago.”
. . . oh, God, she thought and tried very hard not to cry because she knew if she started crying that would make him feel even worse and he had been feeling pretty bad for a long time.
The Story of O
Constance and Bob’s fourth-rate theater of sadism and despair started off rather simply. She was the first one to get the warts. They were venereal warts inside of her vagina.
She’d had a drunken one-night-stand love affair with a middle-aged lawyer who had read her book. She was a twenty-three-year-old-just-failed novelist and he had told her that he liked her book and she was feeling very badly because the book, though it was a critical success, was not selling, and she had been forced to go back to work.
So she went to bed with the lawyer and got warts in her vagina.
They looked like a hideous clump of nightmare mushrooms. They had to be burned off with an electric needle: one painful treatment following on the claws of another painful treatment.
When she found out that she had the warts, she talked to Bob about ending their marriage. She felt so embarrassed. She thought that there was no reason to continue her life.
“Please . . . ,” she said. “I can’t go on living with you. I’ve done such a terrible thing.”
“No way,” Bob told her and was so good to her, knowing all about the affair, and he took care of everything in a super-effective way which was how he handled things . . . then.
They could not have a normal sex life for two months because that’s how long it took for the warts to be burned out of her vagina and sometimes when she came home from seeing the doctor and his electric needle, she would just sit down and start crying.
Bob comforted her and took care of her and made her feel better, caressing her hair, holding her, talking gently to her, “You’re my woman. I love you. It will be all over soon,” until she stopped crying.
Because they were denied access to a traditional sex life, venereal warts are caused by a communicable virus that’s transmitted through intercourse, they had to do other things, which they did.
They really liked having intercourse together. Bob loved the way his penis fit inside of Constance’s vagina, and she did, too. They used to make jokes about erotic plumbing. They were both kind of traditional sex fiends.
One day somebody loaned Bob a copy of the Story of O, which he read. It is a gothic sadomasochist novel that sort of turned him on because he thought that it was so strange. He would get a partial erection when he read it.
After he finished the book, he gave it to Constance to read because she was curious about it.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
She read it and got sort of turned on, too.
“It’s kind of sexy,” she said.
A week after they had both finished reading it, they were drunkish one evening and sexually playing around in their special ways because they were denied the regular sex act.
Usually, she would jack him off or orally copulate him and he would very carefully, like cutting a diamond, clitorally masturbate her until she came. He could have gotten a job at Tiffany’s.
They were lying there in bed, sort of drunk, when he said, “Why don’t we play the Story of O?”
“OK,” Constance said, smiling. “Which part do I play?”
The Story of O Game
They had a lot of fun playing the Story of O game for the first time. Constance found some scarfs for him to tie her up with and she found a large silk handkerchief for him to gag her with. Bob tied a knot in the center of the handkerchief as he had seen on television and in the movies and put the knot between her teeth and tied the ends of the handkerchief tightly at the back of her head, so that her mouth was forced open by the knot.
Her hands were tied behind her back.
She was breathing very heavily. She had never been tied and gagged before. He caressed her breasts and her thighs. She liked the feeling of helplessness and pleasure.
Then he whipped her very gently with his belt and she moaned pleasurably from behind the gag. While all this was happening, he still had his clothes on. She lay naked on the bed.
After a while he took his clothes off and joined her on the bed. She rubbed up against him, moaning all the time through the gag. She was very excited. He put his finger on her clitoris diamondly, so as to avoid touching the burned-off wart areas and hurting her.
He was not interested in hurting her.
Bob rolled Constance over, so that her back was to him, and he guided her bound hands to his penis and he had his left hand touching her clitoris and his right hand caressing her right breast, which was quite beautiful, not too small and not too large: with a small pink-rose nipple.
Constance awkwardly and beautifully jacked him off while he masturbated her carefully and beautifully and they almost came together.
Their bodies raged like an apocalypse of fire, pleasure, and small-time perversion.
Warts
When the warts were discovered inside of Constance’s vagina, Bob checked himself out for them, but there weren’t any warts on his penis.
Venereal warts are spread by a virus through sexual intercourse, but only a small percentage of the people who come in contact with the virus actually get them, so some people will carry the virus and not get the warts and some people will come in contact with the virus without getting them.
Bob was very relieved that he did not have them. Weeks passed and no warts appeared on his penis, so they assumed that he would not get them, but then one night when she was almost clear of them, he was peeing and discovered that he had some warts inside of his penis.
It had never dawned on him to look inside of his penis, down into the urethra. The warts were like an evil little island of pink mucous roses.
He couldn’t believe it. He stood there staring at the warts in his penis. He thought that he was going to throw up.
Long after he had finished peeing, he was still standing there above the toilet bowl, staring at his penis.
Then he put it back into his pants as if he were folding a dead octopus tentacle into his shorts and flushed the toilet.
The urine swirled like an evil punctuation mark and disappeared. The sun was going down, too. He waited for Constance to come home from visiting a friend. The apartment was very quiet He didn’t turn the lights on. Normally, he hated the dark. He stared out the window at the early evening traffic that sounded like rain. He shivered as if he were cold. The cars passing down below made him think of a very lonely rainy afternoon in his childhood.
He went back there again.
When she opened the door with her key and came in, the apartment was dark, so she turned a light on. She didn’t think he was there. He was sitting in the room a few feet away from her, staring out the window with eyes that looked as if they had transparent lead in them.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’ve got warts in my cock,” he said.
She sat down very carefully on the floor beside him as if she were sitting on a decayed spider web.
‘Deeply do I mourn, for my friends
are nothing worth’
“These are just fragments,” Bob said, almost a year later to Constance lying bound and gagged on a bed without any clothes on, her head resting in his lap.
“Lines,” he said. “Parts of lines . . .” He paused and then forgot for a moment what he was talking about.
Constance waited for him to remember what he was talking about. He was turning the pages of the book but he didn’t know why. They turned like leaves in an absent-minded wind.
Then he remembered what he was doing and started over again, repeating the very same words that he had just used. “These are just fragments. Lines,” he said. “Parts of lines and sometimes only single words that remain from the original poems written by the Greeks thousands of years ago.”
Willard and His Bowling Trophies Page 1